Nearly 75 years ago, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger wondered if the mysterious world of quantum mechanics played a role in biology. A recent finding by Northwestern University's Prem Kumar adds further evidence that the answer might be yes.
Kumar and his team have, for the first time, created quantum entanglement from a biological system. This finding could advance scientists' fundamental understanding of biology and potentially open doors to exploit biological tools to enable new functions by harnessing quantum mechanics.
"Can we apply quantum tools to learn about biology?" said Kumar, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and of physics and astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "People have asked this question for many, many years -- dating back to the dawn of quantum mechanics. The reason we are interested in these new quantum states is because they allow applications that are otherwise impossible."
Partially supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research was published Dec. 5 in Nature Communications.
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